Hospital Reduced Its Payroll Expenses By Using ADP Enterprise eTIME

By Automatic Data Processing

The Challenge
Because of intensifying competition and rapidly increasing costs in the health care industry, the hospital continually seeks ways to reduce costs without affecting customer care. During 2004, the management team saw opportunities to reduce costs by improving its time, attendance, and payroll workflows. Payroll is typically one of the largest expense areas for hospitals — and one that is hard to reduce — because of a scarcity of well-trained healthcare professionals.

The hospital's time and attendance workflows were entirely paper based and involved a blend of both union and non-union employees who were all subject to different pay rules. This complexity posed a number of problems:

• Payroll accuracy. Because employees filled out their own time sheets and this data was manually transferred among a number of administrators and managers, the hospital was concerned that human error was inflating payroll costs.
• Staff productivity. The paper-based workflows were labor intensive, distracted managers and administrators from their core functions, and reduced productivity.
• Overtime costs. The hospital's hourly employees are occasionally at the hospital for brief periods of time before or after their assigned shifts. Because this non-shift time is typically unrelated to work, and treated as over time under labor rules, management wanted to ensure that employees were compensated only for time spent working during assigned shifts.